Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Former White House executive chef Walter Scheib, who served Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush from 1994 to 2005, was found dead on June 21 near a hiking trail outside of Taos, New Mexico. Scheib's body was found in a river about a mile-and-a-half from the Yerba Canyon Trailhead where his car was parked. New Mexico State Police launched a search for Scheib, 61, after his girlfriend reported him missing. Before becoming White House chef, Scheib was the chef at the Greenbrier resort and spa at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. For decades, the adjacent mountain connected to the resort housed a 112,544 square foot underground bunker that was to have been used by Congress during a nuclear war. The facility was decommissioned in the early 1990s and the U.S. government canceled its lease in 1995. Scheib was hired at the White House on the recommendation of then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

On September 11, 2011, Scheib told ABC News's Rebecca Cooper that he was too upset to talk about what was happening to the country after the White House began evacuating non-essential staff after a plane was reported to be heading toward the executive mansion. Cooper described what Scheib told her to ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings. The following YouTube video includes Scheib's comments to Cooper. Cooper describes Scheib as "too rattled" and "couldn't speak" but Cooper also reported that Scheib and his staff "did know what's going on in the country today."

Could Scheib's knowledge about what was going on "in the country today" have earned him a "wet affairs" hit? On September 11, President Bush was at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida and Vice President Dick Cheney took full command of the presidential response to the 9/11 attack from the White House's Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), a fortified bunker under the East Wing. Had Scheib overheard something concerning Cheney's role in the events of 9/11 or something worse?

A medical examination of Scheib's body will be complicated by the fact that it was found in a river. Even a short exposure to water can mar toxicology and other test results.

In the event the YouTube video clip disappears from the YouTube site, as is often the case with some 9/11-related clips, WMR has uploaded the relevant quote to its own server.Scheib's death while hiking is reminiscent of that of former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook who is said to have died from a heart attack at the age of 59 while hiking in the Scottish Highlands. After he collapsed, Cook fell 8 feet down a ridge. Norman Baker, a Liberal Democratic MP, said Cook died as the result of an intelligence agency hit and stressed that it was the same fate that befell British Defense Ministry weapons of mass destruction expert David Kelley. A month before his death, on July 8, 2005, Cook penned an article in The Guardian that accused the CIA of running Al Qaeda, the designated 9/11 "bogeyman." Cook wrote: "Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally 'the database,' was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians." As Foreign Secretary, Cook was in charge of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.S. National Security Agency's British partner.